Blackboard is an online course management system that allows faculty and students to communicate and share resources relevant to their courses.
Top Ten Tips for Using Blackboard (PDF document)
Blackboard has a search tool, which allows you to search through all the course websites and organization sites to which you have access. The search tool even searches PDFs, Word, Powerpoint, and Excel files!
To search all of your sites:
To search within a single course:
Your Blackboard home page is editable! Click on the Modify Content button to choose different content modules to include on your home page. Examples of modules you can add:
Click on the Modify Layout button to rearrange the content modules on your home page. You can also customize the contents of the My Research and My Extras tabs.
This is a great way to find content in a Blackboard site with fewer clicks:
You can send e-mail to your class through Blackboard. To access the Send E-mail tool:
Note: When you send mail to “All Users” your instructors and TAs are included on the recipient list.
You can access the library’s e-reserves for any course from your Blackboard course website:
If your instructor is posting grades in Blackboard, here is how you can access them:
Most assignments, quizzes and surveys administered through Blackboard are time-restricted, meaning that they will disappear from Blackboard after the assignment deadline. But you can still access your answers or submissions to these assignments through the Check Grades tool (see tip # 6). Click on a given grade to see a record of your work for that assignment or quiz. This only works for assignments or quizzes originally submitted through Blackboard, and for courses which are still available to you (generally, current term only).
Blackboard has several tools which facilitate group work: blogs, wikis, and even private discussion boards for groups of students. If group work has been assigned in your class, ask your instructor to set up collaborative work areas for you in the course website. Blackboard.Support@dartmouth.edu can help facilitate this.
Recognized student organizations may request a Blackboard organizational site. These sites look very similar to course websites, and can be used to organize and share documents, or to create collaborative work spaces such as wikis. Send a request to Blackboard.Support@dartmouth.edu if you would like to apply for one of these sites.
If you have questions about Blackboard:
If you are on a public computer, it’s important to log out of Blackboard and off the Dartmouth network - otherwise, the next user who comes along will be able to log into Blackboard as you! To log out:
